At UC Davis, the most popular course on campus is no longer Human Sexuality or Introduction to Brewing and Beer. Last year, those two classes were overtaken by a chemical engineering class called Design of Coffee, where students learn to roast and brew coffee.

“Coffee is now better than beer and sex,” said chemical engineering Professor Bill Ristenpart, one of the class’ two instructors.

Still, coffee has yet to gain the respect that brewing and winemaking get at the university level. That is starting to change with a new Coffee Center on campus, the first of its kind in the United States, which will be funded in part by a $250,000 donation from Peet’s Coffee that was announced this week. When the center opens, most likely next year, research will focus on post-harvest aspects of coffee production, starting with processing at the farm and including roasting, brewing and sensory analysis.

“There’s a dearth of science in coffee,” said Doug Welsh, vice president for coffee and roastmaster at Peet’s Coffee. “The industry is short on science and long on experience or experiential learning. Everything I learned about coffee I learned on the job.”

The Peet’s gift will fund the construction of a roastery room in a renovated building that will house the Coffee Center. Ristenpart will head up the center with Professor Tonya Kuhl, the other Design of Coffee instructor, and Jean-Xavier Guinard, a professor and sensory scientist in the department of food science and technology. Ristenpart is currently working on getting donations of world-class coffee roasters and other equipment.

“Historically, a lot of the state and federal support for agricultural research is for things grown here,” he said. Since coffee is not cultivated in the U.S., other than in Hawaii (and a small plot in Santa Barbara), the professors planning the center have had to rely on private funding. “There’s a tremendous amount of work to be done on coffee roasting and brewing,” he added.

For example, the Coffee Center will have a state-of-the-art mass spectrometry lab to find out which chemical compounds are responsible for producing specific flavors in coffee, whether it’s blueberry or tropical fruit. Ristenpart said it will also investigate the microbiology of fermentation and the chemical reaction pathways and kinetics that take place during roasting and brewing, among other research areas.

“We have a group of about 20 faculty across campus with expertise in various disciplines that pertain strongly to coffee, but we haven’t really focused that intellectual firepower on coffee yet,” he said in an email.

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“I think it’s going to be a huge step,” said Tsuno, who said roasters have never had the tools or knowledge to test the theories they develop through tasting. “We know that different chemical reactions happen at different temperatures. But it’s been virtually impossible for the industry to say at this temperature, and this time, and this moisture level, this flavor compound is created.”

Welsh and Tsuno said they would love to see the center eventually produce university-trained coffee professionals, just as the school does wine professionals. Right now, UC Davis offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in viticulture and enology, with more than 40 classes available.

“It will add some validity to the industry,” said Tsuno.

Until the center opens, Davis has the Design of Coffee class, which enrolled 1,500 students last academic year.

“The proof really is in the excitement that class has generated,” said Welsh. “There is a big appetite.”

Tara Duggan has written for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1999, starting out as a culinary intern in the Food & Wine department’s test kitchen. A food writer and recipe developer, she covers home cooking, restaurants, food trends, sustainable agriculture and food policy, all with a Northern California focus. A graduate of the California Culinary Academy, Tara also creates and tests recipes for feature stories in the paper. For 11 years, she wrote The Working Cook, a quick-cooking recipe column that appeared biweekly in The Chronicle. She wrote a cookbook based on the column in 2006 and has since written three other cookbooks.